Leslie B. Lamport (born February 7, 1941) is an Americancomputer scientist. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX.[2] Leslie Lamport was the winner of the 2013 Turing Award[3] for imposing clear, well-defined coherence on the seemingly chaotic behavior of distributed computing systems, in which several autonomous computers communicate with each other by passing messages. He devised important algorithms and developed formal modeling and verification protocols that improve the quality of real distributed systems. These contributions have resulted in improved correctness, performance, and reliability of computer systems.[4][5][6][7][8]

These papers relate to such concepts as logical clocks (and the happened-before relationship) and Byzantine failures. They are among the most cited papers in the field of computer science[16] and describe algorithms to solve many fundamental problems in distributed systems, including:

Lamport is also known for his work on temporal logic, where he introduced the temporal logic of actions (TLA).[17][18] Among his more recent contributions is TLA+, a language for specifying and reasoning about concurrent and reactive systems, that he describes in the book “Specifying Systems: The TLA+ Language and Tools for Hardware and Software Engineers”[19] and defines as a “quixotic attempt to overcome engineers' antipathy towards mathematics”.[20]

^Savage, N. (2014). "General agreement: Leslie Lamport contributed to the theory and practice of building distributed computing systems that work as intended". Communications of the ACM. 57 (6): 22–23. doi:10.1145/2601076.